Don Diavolo turned on his heel and went out. Inspector Church followed, thinking to himself, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he killed her just for the publicity!” He glared at the pipe he held rather as if it were a bomb with a lighted fuse.
Woody Haines ambled down the corridor with them to the elevators. “See you later, boys,” he said. “I’ve got to make an edition with this yarn.” He grinned and waved a big, amiable hand.
Church yelled after his retreating back. “If you put anything in it about bats, it’ll be the last inside story you ever get out of me! That’s no fooling!”
On stage, Diavolo swung into his smoothly routined parade of deceptions. He closed as usual with the production, from beneath a great Spanish cape, of The Stack of Giant Fishbowls.
He went forward to take his bow at the footlights and the curtains closed behind him. Inspector Church, watching from the wings said, “Damn!” and dashed out after him. But Diavolo backed through between the curtains just then, still bowing.
Church said, “I wish you wouldn’t do that. Makes me nervous. I like to keep you where I can see you.”
Pat, coming forward put in: “The new finish on The Sucker Dove Vanish is a wow, Don. Did you like it, Inspector?”
Church growled peevishly. “I don’t like that word ‘vanish.’”
Pat smiled mysteriously and, as the Inspector turned, winked once at the magician and nodded her head. Then, together the three of them returned to the dressing room.
Pat went on down the corridor toward her own. Church and the scarlet-costumed Diavolo went in to where an unhappy-looking Chan was sitting, surrounded by detectives who were laying down a rapid-fire barrage of questions.
The Scarlet Wizard preceded the Inspector into the small ten-foot cubicle that was the inner dressing room.
Suddenly he whirled, and slammed the door in the Inspector’s face. They all heard the lock click over. Chan, watching them, grinned again, inscrutably.
The Manhattan Theater Building is built of solid steel and concrete according to the latest fireproof construction methods. Don Diavolo’s dressing room was, just as he had said, entirely without doors, windows or concealed exits. Near the ceiling there was a small air-conditioning vent hardly large enough for an underfed kitten to squeeze through. That was all.
The door was made of fire resisting metal. It also proved supremely able to resist the frantic efforts of Inspector Church and the whole Homicide Squad.
Not a sound came through the door from inside in answer to their demands. Ten minutes later, when they had gloomily abandoned unsuccessful efforts to smash the door and were beginning to talk about blow-torches and blasting, the phone rang. Somehow its shrill, insistent peal seemed also to have in it a gay, mocking laugh.
That may have been the Inspector’s heated imagination. But when he picked the phone up and put the receiver to his ear, what he heard was not imagination — it was a gay, mocking laugh and the voice that followed it was all too familiar.
It was a voice that the Inspector could never mistake — a deep, melodious, hypnotically compelling voice — Don Diavolo’s!
“There’s that word again, Inspector,” he laughed. “Vanish. I had to do it. Sorry. I’ll see you later. And don’t bother to trace this call. The number is Rockefeller 8-9246. It’s a booth in the waiting room of the Pennsylvania Station!”
The receiver at the other end was returned to its hook.
Church turned, the receiver still in his hand. “I don’t believe it!” he gasped. “There’s a phone in that dressing room and he’s just trying to make me think—”
Chan’s calm voice said, “No, Inspector, there is no phone there.”
But the Inspector never heard him. His jaw dropped at least a foot. He was staring at something behind and beyond the others that sent a cold shiver chasing itself up and down his spine!
The locked door of the dressing room that they had been trying to break down was swinging with a slow uncanny motion, outward on its hinges.
But nothing at all came through it.
The dressing room was utterly empty!
Except that in the center of its floor Don Diavolo’s scarlet stage costume lay where it had fallen in a crumpled heap!
2
Diavolo was considerably annoyed at the recent motion pictures which have “exposed” this method of doing the telepathy act. This method has never been adequately perfected for stage use. The apparatus actually required, is entirely too bulky and too mechanically uncertain. The real method is far simpler.
3
Don Diavolo, on another occasion, did escape under exactly the conditions Inspector Church outlined. The method he used will be described in a later story. Watch for it!
CHAPTER V
Recipe for Vanishing
A SIXTEEN-CYLINDER Packard, painted a flaming scarlet, waited outside a drugstore on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 71st Street, its motor running.
A man came out of a nearby bar and steered an unsteady course up the street. He fumbled awkwardly at a pack of cigarettes, finally managed to extract one, and then hunted vainly through his pockets for a match. He saw the red car, then weaved toward it and put his head in at the door.
“Shay,” he said thickly. “Could one of you girlsh shupply me with a match? I don’t sheem to have—”
He stopped and gulped. He tried to get a better focus with his eyes.
“Excushe me, miss,” he said then, trying to bow and stopping just short of a somersault. “I thought there were two of you. I guessh that lasht stinger was two too many.” Forgetting the match, he wandered off again, blinking. After two bad tries he managed finally to steer his way through the door of the drugstore where he ordered, “A bromo-seltzer and go light on the soda.”
As the clerk mixed the foaming drink, his customer caught sight of the man who came from a telephone booth at the rear of the store and hurried quickly out, a man who wore scarlet evening clothes and no hat.
The inebriate blinked and said, “Make that two bromos and about a quart of your blackest coffee.”
Don Diavolo stepped into the scarlet car and said, “Let’s go, girls.” The purring motor roared and the car sprang forward.
The bromo-seltzers and coffee weren’t really necessary after all. There were two girls in the car — two girls who looked so much alike they might have been one girl — before a mirror. Patricia Collins, still in her stage costume, was one. The other was her sister, Mickey. Don called them Pat and Mike. He himself couldn’t tell which was which.
The only person who could do that was Woody Haines. And the only way he could do it was to kiss them. He said that when he kissed Pat, she always kissed him back as if she meant it. When he mistakenly got Mike instead, she always grinned and said, “Wrong again, darling!”
If the reader will promise not to breathe a word of it to anyone else, we’ll tell him that the twins’ identical appearance was the secret of one of Don’s best tricks — The Lady Who is in Two Places at Once. Offstage they were under orders not to be seen together in public — and Mickey ordinarily wore a black wig over her own golden-blond hair. But today was an exception. In accomplishing the astounding vanish into thin air that had given Inspector Church kittens, Don had needed the assistance of both girls.
Even at that, Mickey still didn’t know what had happened.
“Come on, Mysterioso,” she said as she steered the big car through a space between two trucks that appeared hardly large enough for a skinny man on a bicycle. “Talk fast. What is this all about?”
Diavolo grinned wickedly. “Just a little impromptu vanishing trick. A benefit performance for Inspector Church and the Homicide Squad. I haven’t got time to go to jail. I’m a busy man. So I thought I had better escape his clutches before they got complicated.”
“I didn’t cue Pat to tell him her bat story; but when he accused me of it, he gave me an idea. And so I did cue her to make a few preparations. I transmitted the idea, in the usual way, that
she should see you and have you get the car out and ready to go.”
“She was also to tell Woody to leave the theater at once, go to the cleaners on the corner where Chan had sent my other suit of red evening clothes. He was to change into them and come back into the theater without letting Church see him. He waited behind some scenery, in the wings opposite the Inspector, and, when I took my bow out at the footlights and the curtains closed behind me, he entered from the side in front of the curtain.
“For a moment then the audience saw two Diavolos but Inspector Church, behind the curtain, couldn’t see any!”
Pat smiled, “Like the drunk that saw us back there, they probably think they had a drink too much. They’ll all go home and tell their friends they saw two Diavolos vanishing a pink elephant!”
Mickey said, “Okay so far, Don. Woody walked out and then backed, bowing, through the curtains into the Inspector’s clutches while you walked off at the side and hid in the wings until they had gone.”
“Yes, Diavolo said, “and Pat here hurried up and started a conversation with him so Woody wouldn’t have to talk. I forgot one thing though, Pat, I must be slipping. When I cooked up the idea I never even thought of Woody’s blond head of hair. Mine’s jet black. And when he showed up out there, his was, too. What did he do to it so quickly?”
“I saw him for a minute in the wings,” Pat answered, “while Church had his eyes glued on your act. He told me that had him stumped, too. All the time he was changing he was wondering why you hadn’t given me any instructions on that and if you thought Church was as blind as a bat!”
“He didn’t know what to do about it on such short notice until he came out of the cleaner’s and he saw a sign in that snooty pet shop across the street. It said, ‘Flea powder in all shades to match your dog.’”
“He went in and bought some to match a black poodle. When the clerk saw him empty the whole package on his head and rub it in, he phoned the cops and told them there was a madman in the place. But by that time Woody’s hair was a dozen shades darker and he scrammed. He says he’ll pay hush money if you won’t let any of the other columnists in town know that he uses poodle flea powder!”
Diavolo laughed and then grew serious. “I’ll trade him even if he doesn’t mention bats in his story until I’ve found out what the devil it’s all about.”
Mickey said, “Go on, finish it. Woody went back to the dressing room with the Inspector thinking he was you. They wouldn’t take him to headquarters still wearing the mask. They’ll have caught on by now. And what was that phone call for?”
“Woody went into the dressing room ahead of Church and slammed the door in his face, Mickey,” Diavolo explained. “Then while they were trying to batter down the door he was supposed to shuck my dress clothes and get into one of my ordinary street suits. The phone call was the magician’s old standby, misdirection.
“I figured that with any sort of luck at all, when they heard my voice on the phone, everyone’s attention should have been riveted on it. And Woody would have time to ease that door open and crawl out behind the divan. I think it worked because I clicked the receiver, pretending to hang up and then listened a moment. I heard the Inspector say ‘I’m damned if I’ll believe it! Lieutenant tear that room apart! If you don’t find a trapdoor I’ll eat my hat.’
“Remind me, Pat, to send him a hat!”
“You don’t need to write poetry about it, smarty,” Mickey smiled. “It’s a good stunt though. They might even have been upset enough that they dashed into the little dressing room giving Woody a chance to make the corridor.”
“That’s what I hope,” Don said. “Even if he could only get halfway to the door he could turn and pretend to be coming in from the hallway.”
“But what are you going to do, Don?” Pat asked. “The Inspector told headquarters to send a detective detail to search the Fox Street house. Even if we do go in the back way we’ll be trapped there. You’re so well known that if you stick your nose out after that, cops will land on you from all directions.”
“I’ll use disguise Number Four, Patricia my girl. And I’m going to locate the person whose name the murdered girl was trying to write on the floor with her lipstick just before she died.”
“But she wrote Chan’s name,” Pat said. “I don’t see—”
“Look.” Diavolo made the motion he makes when he produces a fan of playing cards at his fingertips. Only this time he produced the folded paper he had taken from the girl’s purse.
He handed it to Pat and pointed to the list of names that was written on the side opposite the vampire notes.
Estelle Saylor
Ogden Saylor
Mabel Owens
Avery S. Chandler
“Chandler, the theatrical producer!” Pat said. “She might have been trying to write his name! And she didn’t get it finished before she….”
“That’s the idea, Pat. I hope.”
The scarlet car cut across Sheridan Square and vanished into one of the tiny, tucked-away streets beyond, in the heart of Greenwich Village. The street was a cul-de-sac across the end of which stood an old apparently unused carriage house. Mickey drove the car straight at its wide closed doors.
Diavolo touched a button on the dashboard of the speeding car. Instantly the carriage house doors moved inward, folding back on themselves. The button Don had pressed blew a horn that gave off a note too high in frequency for human ears to hear. But the electric ear that set the doors in motion heard it and acted. The car slid silently into the dark interior and the doors closed automatically behind it.
Diavolo, springing from the car uttered aloud the mystic words, “Om Mani Padme Hum,” the magic Buddhist prayer. A sliding panel moved in the wall and a moment later the scarlet car stood silently in the carriage house — alone.
The houses on the street in front, like most of those in the Village were easily a hundred years old, and were built adjoining each other — no space at all between. On the bell push of the red-brick house next to Diavolo’s there was a card that read:
Parish House
The Rev. O. O. VanLio, D. D.
An anagram player with nothing better to do, seeing the good Reverend’s name, might have noticed that its letters, rearranged slightly, also spelled Don Diavolo. But the police officers who were busily searching Don’s house next door had — or thought they had — something better to do. And they weren’t interested in anagrams — they were concerned with murder.
Don Diavolo went immediately to a large glass panel set in the wall of the Reverend’s house. Looking through it, he saw into the living room of his own house next door. The house that people called the House of Magic.
Karl Hartz was there, watching the detectives make their search and keeping an eagle eye out to see that they didn’t walk off with the silverware. They could not see the smiling Diavolo who watched them because, on their side, the glass panel appeared to be only a great mirror set into the wall above the fireplace. It was made of the “one-way” glass commonly used in gambling casinos by a management who wants secretly to inspect its customers on the way in.
Don touched a second button and he could hear their voices. He also heard, after a moment, a ringing phone. He saw Karl Hartz go to take it and one of the detectives step in ahead of him. Don lifted a phone nearby and cut himself in on the conversation.
“Hello?” he heard the dick say.
A businesslike voice at the other end asked, “Is Mr. Diavolo in?”
The dick, speaking in the polite, but subservient manner of a butler or a secretary said, “I’ll see. Who is this calling, please?”
The voice hesitated for a moment and then replied, “Mr. V.M. Pyer.” And, just to make sure, he spelled it.
The detective said, “Thank you. Just a moment.” He held his hand over the mouthpiece and called, “Muller, get to that prowl car outside, quick. Radio headquarters to trace this call. Step on it!”
That was when Diavolo cut the detective off
the line. Into his mouthpiece he said, “Mr. Diavolo speaking, Mr. Pyer. I was hoping to hear from you. With a name like that I suppose your friends call you ‘Bat,’ don’t they?”
The voice laughed. “I wanted to be quite sure that you’d come to the phone,” it said. “And I didn’t want to give my right name to your man. I want you to come at once. I can tell you who the Bat is!”
“But,” Don said, frowning, “what makes you think I want to know anything about a bat, and where are you and who are you?”
“I’m at my offices in the Theatrical Arts Bldg.,” the voice said. “This is Avery Chandler.”
CHAPTER VI
No Living Man
DON DIAVOLO changed from his scarlet evening clothes with the rapidity of a lightning change artist. He quickly applied a light coating of tan makeup (Max Fischer’s No. 4), pulled on a tuxedo, popped a monocle into his right eye, and was tying a long, pale green, dress turban around his head with swift practiced motions when Pat knocked and came in.
“Don,” she said, “Do you know the name of the new ballerina at the Music Hall?”
“Inez LaValle,” he answered. “But I’m not greatly interested. Why?”
“I mean her real name.” Pat said.
“No,” replied Don. “I didn’t even ask her for her phone number.”
“I didn’t think you knew when you showed me that list of names. But I think you should. She’s on it. She is Mabel Owens.”
Diavolo turned to look at Pat. Then he tucked the end of the turban in place and said, “I am interested now. So, one of the persons on that list turns out to have been in the building this afternoon when what happened happened. This is beginning to be fun.”
He placed a cigarette in a long black holder and a small automatic in his hip pocket — a curious gun that was painted flesh color. He lit the cigarette, glanced at a mirror, and nodded with satisfaction at the suave Oriental potentate he saw there.
“The Maharajah,” he announced, “is going to pay a social call. When those dicks next door leave, go in and tell Karl to bar the door and not allow any more of them in without a search warrant. And sit tight. I’ll be seeing you.”
Death out of Thin Air Page 3
